Dahlia Lithwick: We Are All Fetuses Now

[Nevilledog]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/03/we-are-all-fetuses-now.html

It’s become axiomatic in our political discourse that one of the reasons the anti-abortion crowd became so powerfully persuasive in the decades after Roe is that claiming to speak for a fetus is rhetorically unassailable. If every fertilized egg is a human life, nobody can claim to understand its preferences and hopes and dreams, so substituting the voice of the movement is a simple matter: All fertilized eggs want to live and thrive, goes the theory. End of policy debate.

This is why, as Barney Frank famously put it, “these people believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth.” It’s why the quote from Dave Barnhart that went viral right before Roe was overturned is still so perfectly apt. As the pastor put it:

The unborn are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

The emptiness of this interest in life is also why so many anti-abortion politicians mouthed platitudes after Dobbs about their increased focus on poverty, food insecurity, and maternal and child health—and why very little of this has actually materialized.

But what many of us have missed is that the tactic of protecting the voiceless innocent unborn has now been deployed to deprive actual living, breathing, ambulating humans of moral agency as well. It’s the tactic being used to ban books, to silence teachers, to go after drag performances, to deny health care to families seeking to support trans kids. The notion that everyone must be protected from a scourge of immorality is, in some ways, old wine in a new bottle. But it is also a creeping form of illiberalism that ensures that for some GOP politicians, we all remain fetuses forever.

*snip*